Air Tanker Fleet Incomplete. What types of aircraft are required? What does it take to maintain these aircraft on a yearly basis? Tell me about pilots and maintenance crews in addition to their support logistics with regards to fighting fires.
The OP’s link dropped me behind a paywall. This seems to be the same AP story on another website. Hopefully one or the other of those links will work.
key points…
[ul][li]“About a decade ago the Forest Service had more than 40 of the big tankers at its disposal…” [/li][li]“the fleet hit a low of eight aircraft at one point last year,”[/li][li]The average age of the air tanker fleet is “half a century” [/ul][/li]
I’m no aircraft mechanic, but ISTM that there are very few 50 year old planes of any sort still flying. Passenger planes require periodic major maintenance that is just short of dismantling the entire plane and rebuilding it anew. Not sure if air tankers get the same treatment.
two planes contracted by the Forest Service (USA) crashed in 2002 due to lack of maintenance.
‘Any sort’? Much of the General Aviation fleet is pushing 40 years old. Many ‘little airplanes’ flying today were built in the early-to-mid 1960s. Airplanes built in the '50s are far from rare, and Beechcraft Bonanzas built in the 1940s are not really uncommon. For ‘passenger planes’, there are around 400 Douglas DC-3s/C-47s still airworthy. There are quite a few DC-4s and Convairs flying cargo in remote areas, too.
I think a common misconception is that planes are like cars - “It’s going to cost so much to fix it, we might as well buy a new one.” Really further from the truth.
New planes are hideously expensive, and all aircraft MUST go through a routine of inspection and repair to remain certified. Indeed older, more sturdily built planes who have also benefited by new technologies and decades of incremental improvements are better aircraft than they were when they were built.
Likely the reason there is a limited fleet of firefighting aircraft is due to the uncertain nature of need tied with the dependence upon civilian contractors makes creating, maintaining and providing these planes risky and expensive, a chance few are willing to take without some greater government resources.
Iggy. FYI - The link is now behind a pay wall but it wasn’t when I first came upon it and linked it to this thread. (Wonder why?) Sorry.
The detail you provided is accurate. Thank you.
A lot of military planes are really old, too. We’re still getting plenty of use out of the good old B-52, and a quick Google says that they average over 50 years old.
All planes have duty cycles on various parts. It’s not always known ahead of time when that cycle is up. The C-130 firefighter is an example.
The plane that left the factory is not the same plane you see today. Take the A10 for example. It got a wing replacement to extend the life of the plane.
The B52 has been compared to ‘My Grandfather’s Axe’. There may not be any original parts left on the oldest units. If there are it would only be some pieces of the fuselage frame.
Maybe that’s true in the commercial fleet, but that’s because those planes work for living. Their purpose is to make money, so the airlines accumulate flight hours/cycles as rapidly as they can.
Not so for planes in other types of service. Firefighting is a good example. The planes used for combating wildfiires may be be old, but they won’t have nearly as many takeoffs/landings or flight hours as a comparably-aged commercial aircraft.
Yeah, but … 
The work environment when they are working is rather hard on them & the pilots. :eek:
Most planes in the firefighting service are retrofitted from planes retired **from **commercial and military service, IIRC.
There are purpose built planes like the CL415 but at roughly $30M a pop you can bet retrofitting an older airframe is a propsition that most accountants will go for. But that has to be balanced by maintenance costs, which tend to be more intensive for older airframes. As noted upthread, the BUFF is still being used and is supposed to be in service until at least 2030, which will make some of those airframes over 80 years old before they retire. The nice thing about planes of this era is that they were overbuilt and have stood up to modification much better than newer designs built on a CAD program. Case in point, the T-33/F-80 airframe is basically un-lifed. It was so overbuilt that with proper care and parts you can fly it essentially forever.
Most have tended to be former military bombers of one sort or another but there have been proposals like this one that I would love to see in action, from fairly far away.
Would it be more cost effective to invest in these types of aircraft at the expense of “boots on the ground”? Note, I understand the need for “boots on the ground” and am not dismissing the need or importance. Just asking, are we going cheap by not investing in aircraft such as the Evergreen International Boeing 747 super tanker firefighter mentioned above? Watch the whole videoif you haven’t already done so. I agree, it is an advertisement, but still.
Firefighters tend to be old “light” bombers, piston-powered antiques.
C-141’s are getting pressed into service, but you need something with a huge payload, short field capability, slow enough and maneuverable enough to hit “this” spot - not “anywhere in that county”
By the time a plane is released from service (AF doesn’t need it? it goes to Air National Guard. National Guard doesn’t want/is done with it? Then the Forestry folks can buy it - one step ahead of the general public).
Between the fact that there aren’t too many old piston light bombers or cargo planes, and nobody is building new ones, there is going to be a serious shortage.
If the AF is stupid enough to dump the A-10, maybe it could be modified to fit the role - any other candidates?
The P-3 has the capacity, but not quite as nimble as it should be.
usedtobe
That is why I mentioned the Evergreen International Boeing 747 super tanker firefighter above.
Really, there’s two big issues. Firstly, the Korean War era P2 Neptunes have frankly had an atrocious safety record over the last two decades during which they’ve been the backbone of the fire fighting fleet. Partly it is because they’re getting old, but also it’s because fire seasons are longer and more intense now and so they’re getting flown a lot more, increasing risk. There’s fewer of the older planes now simply because so many of them have crashed (and they aren’t making any new ones) and plus the Forest Service has been trying to ground the remaining ones for years now.
Which brings up the other issue. The Forest Service has wanted the next gen tankers for years now, but they’ve been expecting the small private aviation contractors to develop them. The messages over the exact specifications (per the FS and the FAA) as well as the actual amount and reliability of funding for the next gen tankers have been very mixed and that has hampered development. The big air contractor based in Montana has been working on a BAE-146 based jet tanker and have a couple more-or-less ready to go, but the project is stalled with contract funding and FAA certification issues. It looks like they will probably sit on the tarmac and the old rattletrap Neptunes will fly again for at least another season.
While, yeah, like everyone has said there aren’t quite as many low-n-slow big payload airplanes on the used market as there were after WWII, other countries have no problems developing firefighting aircraft based on the current used plane market. The problems in the US really are more bureaucratic and legislative than practical.
The 747 tanker looks pretty cool, but I heard a story that went in kinda the other direction. The way I heard it, someone (the state of California, I think) issued a requirement for smaller tankers so that there could be more of them, and refilled rapidly, so they could make lots of small drops on a fire. So a company that builds airplane floats fitted them onto an agricultural plane (a crop duster) so they could refill the water tank by just touching down on a lake for a few seconds. Met the specs that were requested, but then the state wound up not buying them.
Doing a search just now, I see a couple that look like they’re in service in other countries. Maybe it’s still a possibility here.
And, very oddly, it looks a lot like this; coming soon to a theater near you.
Evergreen went out of business last year.
What surprises me is that they haven’t moved forward with water-jet technology. They found years ago that water under high pressure is extremely effective at putting out fires. This technology was put to use in the Iraq war when the Kuwaiti oil fields were set ablaze.
By high pressure I mean water pushed into a mist. It had a much greater effect than the same volume of water sprayed conventionally.